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But how explain the permanence There, while the content of
this sphere- its elements and its living things alike- are
passing?
The reason is given by Plato: the celestial order is from God,
the living things of earth from the gods sprung from God; and it
is law that the offspring of God endures.
In other words, the celestial soul- and our souls with it-
springs directly next from the Creator, while the animal life of
this earth is produced by an image which goes forth from that
celestial soul and may be said to flow downwards from it.
A soul, then, of the minor degree- reproducing, indeed, that of
the Divine sphere but lacking in power inasmuch as it must
exercise its creative act upon inferior stuff in an inferior
region- the substances taken up into the fabric being of
themselves repugnant to duration; with such an origin the living
things of this realm cannot be of strength to last for ever; the
material constituents are not as firmly held and controlled as if
they were ruled immediately by a Principle of higher potency.
The heavens, on the contrary, must have persistence as a whole,
and this entails the persistence of the parts, of the stars they
contain: we could not imagine that whole to endure with the parts
in flux- though, of course, we must distinguish things
sub-celestial from the heavens themselves whose region does not
in fact extend so low as to the moon.
Our own case is different: physically we are formed by that
[inferior] soul, given forth [not directly from God but] from the
divine beings in the heavens and from the heavens themselves; it
is by way of that inferior soul that we are associated with the
body [which therefore will not be persistent]; for the higher
soul which constitutes the We is the principle not of our
existence but of our excellence or, if also of our existence,
then only in the sense that, when the body is already
constituted, it enters, bringing with it some effluence from the
Divine Reason in support of the existence.
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